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Well... if machines're gonna learn learn learn learn learn... Backgrounder Do we need a new processor architecture? Graphcore says that machine learning computation is different from existing computational types, and will be broad enough in its usage for – as well as accelerated significantly by – a dedicated processor architecture.…

Hans Rosling is gone, but dashboards and graphs are dangerous to knowledge So, farewell then Hans Rosling, educator and "Jedi master of data visualisation". For in a world increasingly addicted to alternative facts, you pioneered software – Gapminder – and a viewer-friendly approach with bubble charts that allowed you to communicate simple important messages about the world through the medium of the Ted Talk.…

Why chase balloons for hundreds of miles when you can drop the payload outside? NASA will soon be testing high-altitude parachute systems that let astroboffins land valuable scientific research payloads from altitudes of 60,000 feet.…

Just over $180m in revenue, it turns out... and gross profit of $138m!? Oh, net loss though... App integration software business Mulesoft is set to make its initial public offering after revealing its financials.…

Cupertino files defence against back tax claim, claiming errors and overreach Stop terraforming taxation, says Cupertino, and let us get on with it Apple has filed its defence against the European Commission's claim it owes €13bn in back taxes in Ireland.…

Space. The Final Frontier (for copyright). These are the free images and videos of the ESA The European Space Agency has flung the data doors open: from today, it's adopted an open access policy for its trove of images and videos.…

CEO Travis Kalanick uses alternative diversity facts to prove Uber's goodness Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has appointed Eric Holder, once United States attorney-general under Barack Obama and now a partner of law firm Covington & Burling, to conduct a review of the “specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”…

El Reg surveys fun stuff that's popped up on GitHub and beyond Git, Bad, Ugly It's a slow day, the boss is absent enduring the travails of analysts with lunches to offer, so Vulture South found itself wandering around the odd corners of GitHub.…

Developers want the new shiny, users forget integration and then along come the vendors ... Your attempt at putting Hadoop or Spark to work probably won't work, and you'll be partly to blame for thinking they are magic.…

The plan is to build a database of 'stuff we don't want bombed' Last month, Australia's federal government established a Critical Infrastructure Centre. Now it's decided to ask what the centre should protect.…

This gets interesting when you find your way into a mail server, says dev who found it Stop us if you've heard this one: Java and Python have a bug you can exploit to cross firewalls. Since neither are yet patched, it might be a good day to nag your developers for a bit.…

Senate committee told SA Power 'sat on' a problem for a while while SA sweltered Yet another reason that isn't wind farms has emerged for recent blackouts in the Australian State of South Australia: dodgy software.…

You're going to need a whole lot of Intel Inside to make this work The price and precise performance of Intel's Optane storage-class memory still remain officially obscure, but the company has confirmed the PC version of the product will run only on 7th-generation Core i7, i5 and i3 CPUS nestled into certain motherboards.…

Uni of Washington says the age of Big Data makes statistical literacy essential How could El Reg ignore this? – two University of Washington professors have assembled a course to teach students to identify bullshit.…

Kimble's running out of road The businessman otherwise known as Kim Schmitz, aka "Kimble", aka "Kim Dotcom", has lost his High Court appeal in New Zealand to be extradited to the USA.…

Do they use 'the language of hacking', including referring to themselves as a 'hacker'? Hot on the heels of Liverpool being awarded the European Capital of Culture for 2008 comes a charity programme, run by YouthFed, titled Hackers to Heroes.…

Shrinking before hyperconverged/converged Analysis Current thinking among vendors with hyper-converged and converged infrastructure offerings is that physical SANs are in decline and their market is shrinking. Chad Sakac, Converged Platforms Division president at Dell EMC, is the latest high-profile prognosticator to push this view.…

'Indirect' licence court victory – but at what cost? SAP has scored what threatens to be a pyrrhic victory in court against one of its own customers.…

Haven't named and shamed car-makers though Insecure car-controlling Android apps create a heightened car theft risk, security researchers at Kaspersky Lab warn.…

Kate Sutton talks to El Reg about search and maps Interview “The thing that snookered us came eight years after the event,” Kate Sutton of Streetmap told The Register late last week, following the High Court’s ruling that Google’s manipulation of search results did not destroy her business despite that being exactly what happened.…

HCIA startup denied the full makeover for now Analysis HPE has closed its SimpliVity acquisition and publicised software porting and migration plans but hasn't said anything about SimpliVity hardware moving to a ProLiant server base.…

Valuation Office Agency needs to revaluate its revaluation Rivals BT and Virgin Media have joined hands to collective moan that a forthcoming hike to business rates will result in tripling of their collective tax bill to £1.3bn over the next five years.…

Company didn't confirm whether majority to go to AWS or work, er, warehouse Amazon has announced its intention to increase its UK workforce to over 24,000 this year.…

UK.gov tells search engines to demote dodgy websites or face legislation UK government-hosted talks spanning two Parliaments have culminated in Google and Bing at last agreeing to tweak their search results in response to copyright-holders' concerns, thereby heading off threatened legislation on their conduct.…

You’ll dance with Beyonce in your living room, vows co-founder Analysis 8i, a New Zealand based company, last week landed a large B funding round that reads like a who’s who in the Virtual reality world. Its aim is to bring holograms to the masses. This doesn’t actually mean what it says, but it’s still pretty cool.…

Open source with a difference, from Redmond Analysis Much has changed at Microsoft since Steve Ballmer described Linux as "a cancer" in reaction to the open-source flag-flyer's threat to Redmond's money-spinning Windows business.…

Consumers to be able to access paid-for services when abroad Planned new EU laws aimed at making online content more accessible to those that subscribe to it are closer to being finalised after a deal struck on the new rules earlier this month was endorsed by representatives of national governments across the EU.…

Virtzilla debuts disaster-recovery-as-a-service on dedicated hardware Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is an obvious service to run in the cloud, as the business of operating secondary sites is costly and complex.…

University spends $62m on AI trial, gets the usual trials that come with failure A University of Texas audit report last week tipped a bucket on the conduct of a high-profile “Watson to cure cancer” project.…

The first owner might still have access. And the second. And so on Cars are smart enough to remember an owner, but not smart enough to forget one – and that's a problem if a smart car is sold second-hand.…

2,500 suits to be flung off bench to preach ERP on cloud Deloitte, Amazon Web Services and SAP have cooked up a cloudy consulting confection.…

Complete with faster disk reads, support for more CPUs and the usual grab bag of goodness Linus Torvalds has given us all version 4.10 of the Linux kernel.…

Tip for entrepreneurs: World could soon need automated cloud-sueball-flinger Those of you contemplating a cloud startup have two options: get acquired by one of five companies or build an automatic sueball flinger.…

Uber CEO orders investigation into tribulations of engineer Susan Fowler UPDATED Colour us surprised: a silicon valley darling famous for belligerent market entries, raising middle fingers at regulators and having a relaxed attitude to tax has been accused of also completing a bingo-card of bad management that includes sexism, arse ass-covering, empire-building and malicious management.…

Mess in Windows graphics library can give bad hombres access to memory Google's Project Zero has again revealed a Windows bug before Microsoft fixed it.…

Falls on Akamai's league table can't be automatically pinned on the multi-technology mix Like the sun rising, the release of a new Akamai State of the Internet report inevitably leads to opinion columns bemoaning Australia's slide on global league tables for broadband speed, most attributing it to the much-hated “multi-technology model” NBN.…

And then sticks the landing for good measure after pausing a day for hydraulic glitch Elon Musk's rocket trucking business, SpaceX, is rolling on the celestial highway again after successfully launching a Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket, then landing the rocket's first stage back on terra firma.…

Miscreant used stolen email accounts to cram crap into inboxes A marketer who used stolen email accounts to trouser more than a million dollars by spamming people has been sent down for four years.…

Science lab stuck on 53-day orbit, unable to catch a closer glimpse of alien gas world NASA's Juno probe will not venture any closer to Jupiter, and will stay in its current 53-day orbit for the remainder of its mission. That's due to faulty helium valves in the propulsion system, space boffins announced today.…

34-month sentence and he has to pay his old bosses back A sacked system administrator has been jailed after hacking the control systems of his ex-employer – and causing over a million dollars in damage.…

And it's suing Nokia for patent infringement on wireless comms Long-ago phone-builder BlackBerry has been sued by hundreds of employees who say they were tricked into quitting their jobs.…

The Galaxy S3 is real but is its security FAKE NEWS? Fifteen members of US Congress have asked the House Oversight Committee to investigate whether President Trump is putting national security at risk by using an insecure phone and holding sensitive meetings in public.…

Set aside rational thought, it's Apple click-click story time With the exciting news that Apple is going to hold a conference in June where it will announce new products – only the 15th time it has done so since 2003 – we felt it was time to write down some wild speculation because, like lemmings, you will click on it and we make money when you do.…

Or switch it off, bin it, bury it, whatever's necessary Germany's Federal Network Agency, or Bundesnetzagentur, has banned Genesis Toys' Cayla doll as an illegal surveillance device.…

More evidence that security = happy customers Account holders in the US are more likely to switch banks in the aftermath of fraud, according to a new study.…

Report: It's not going to save money or anything. Plus we'll still need paper It was hard to hear UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s recent backtracking over his plans for a paperless NHS by 2018, without wondering to what extent digital health documents have contributed to global forest depletion over the last decades.…

Rushed proposal opens rift in internet giants' club Exclusive London Internet Exchange (LINX) – Europe's largest provider of internet interconnect services – faces a growing backlash among members over changes to its rules that would gag directors applying secret government orders to monitor traffic, under Britain's new Investigatory Powers Act.…

Come and use DocumentDB, we've fired up Photoshop Microsoft is attempting to capitalise on a recent spate of ransom attacks on unsecured MongoDB instances by encouraging developers to switch to working with its own Azure-based DocumentDB system.…

Getting those pesky ponies into that there corral, yessiree Not every story is NetApp making a hyperconverged product, or Oracle possibly canning tape products. Here's a roundup of several pieces of news that are nevertheless significant.…

'Unlikely Hamas is responsible' – researchers Hackers are continuing to target Israeli Defence Force (IDF) personnel with Android spyware but doubts have emerged that Hamas is behind the cyber-spying operation.…